Cross-Korea Cycling: Highway Of Goodbyes
Written by: Khoi Truong
8am
“I wonder what today has in store for us?”
He shrugged, smiled, and got ready.
Our daily catchphrase was about as normal as that morning would be; we were separated from the get-go. Chandler left his bike on the trail when I picked him up last night, (some 20 km away), so he needed to take a taxi back before he could start his day. I, on the other hand, needed to visit the bicycle repair shop and pray that it didn’t take too much time.
Day six, for me, started off with a little bit of illegal pathfinding. See, returning to the trail would have required me to backtrack a large distance, the resulting detour would have wasted an irrecoverable amount of time. The only way for me to make any sort of progress that day was to cut through to the next trail entry point; and that required me to ride my bike on a highway.
The highway ride was equal parts terrifying and exhilarating.
As a cyclist from Toronto, I learned to keep as far to the right as humanly possible as a safety measure against Toronto’s very own easily-agitated driving populace. Keeping right on the Korean highway, was a safety measure for a different kind of danger: speeding vehicles that aren’t expecting a slow-moving cyclist on the road.
The problem, with highway riding, is that even though you can be fairly comfortable by staying as far to the right as you can. Eventually, however, you’ll reach an on-ramp or off-ramp and for five seconds you’re no longer within the safety of the shoulder, but in the middle of speeding traffic.
The flip side to all this danger, is that the highway was littered with a plethora of fun hills that were easy to ascend and exhilaratingly fast to careen down; it was designed for speeding cars. I was able to traverse an incredible distance within a small amount of time. So much so, that when I got back on the actual trail, I was ahead of Chandler by three hours.
Once back on the trail, I stopped by the nearest checkpoint and took some time to rest while waiting for my partner. While there I saw a good number of familiar faces who stopped by to chat and muse about how close we were to the finish line. Without exception, they each asked me: “where’s Chandler?” or if they couldn’t remember his name, “where’s the foreigner?” forgetting, (since I am of asian descent), that I too was a foreigner in their country.
I waited for Chandler for an hour and a half when he finally texted me to just continue without him. We were both aware of how much faster of a cyclist he was than me, so we were confident that before the end of the day he would catch up to me.
And he did catch up, but only after a few hours of getting lost among some mountains, yelling in frustration, and inadvertently scaring away a few couples.
Once reunited, we continued along the trail while running into members of the 4-Rivers family. We’d wish them well, they’d return the sentiment and then kept going; this was our version of saying farewell. I think it was mutually understood, that since the end was so near, we’d probably never run into each other again.
It would have been more emotional if the exhaustion from the past five and a half days of trials and tribulations didn’t encumber us.
At around late afternoon, we reached a fork in the road; one direction led us on an express path towards the end of the trail, and the other led us on a bit of a detour before the finish line. If we came across this fork a day earlier, we would have ignored the detour due to sheer lack of energy.
However since that was the last day, we both knew how quickly the end was coming, and in order to take in as much of the trail as possible before we reached the sands of Busan, we disregarded our fatigue and took the diversion.
We were rewarded with a charming late-afternoon ride through a few small river-side villages.
Some of the locals were kind enough to offer us some tea and directions as we passed by.
Somewhere along the way, we ran into Team Daddy, and spent the last three hours of the trail riding with them. Coming into Busan, the trip’s finish line, was a mixed bag of emotions and exhaustion. We were tired, and were looking forward to finishing, but at the same time the last few days were filled with so many memories that it was hard not to relish the last few kilometres. We were pedalling kilometre by kilometre in a zen-like silence; mulling over the once-in-a-lifetimeness of it all.
When we finally reached the end, we celebrated by throwing the remainder of our water supply in the air. We promised to keep in touch with Team Daddy and then retreated to my friend Arnold’s dock-side apartment.
You know, even though plenty of things have happened in my life since August of 2012, I can still recall those six days with a remarkable level of vividness. A trip like that really sticks with you; the people, the memories, the sights, the happenings that… well… happened. It’s been a pleasure recounting the trip for you and I hope you enjoyed it and maybe might consider doing one like it yourself. Just remember that everything is easier with a friend, and watch your water supply.
Khoi is an artsy, bohemian, former-traveller in his late twenties. He enjoys adventure, feeling lost, being healthy, and looking good. An intellectual who relishes in frank discussion, his friends describe spending time with him as ‘refreshing.’ Despite a highly social existence during his university years and his early-to-late twenties, Khoi now focuses his attention on developing relationships with more strong-willed, and independent thinkers.
